Peter Costello
This week the civilised world has been marking the fourth centenary of the death of William Shakespeare, poet, playwright and businessman. Universally admired he may be, but his works have suffered many vicissitudes over the years.
The man himself began as a poet in a classical sense. The dramas came perhaps as a way of earning a living in Elizabethan London. From his share in theatrical properties emerged the business interests which dominated his life after he retired to Stratford.
In his time poetry was not held captive in the groves of academe, but lived in the world of court and street. In his lifetime his plays, often adapted from earlier plays or texts, were the subject of political censorship, interference by producers, and the whims of actors – as is the case today. In his lifetime the plays had been issued, perhaps pirated, in defective editions.
After his death two friends gathered the texts, as best they could – no manuscripts by Shakespeare survive – with many differences from earlier versions. Sorting out the textual readings of the plays, and the order and meaning of the sonnets has kept generations of scholars engaged.
The English theatre was badly damaged by Cromwell’s reign; tastes changed and it was not perhaps until the time of Garrick that Shakespeare came back into favour on the stage. Yet he was edited for children, improved for ladies, carefully produced so as not to disgust genteel audiences.
There was even a version of Hamlet prepared without the Prince himself – a notion that seems bizarre to us. Notions that the man from Stratford could not have written the works began and the genius of Shakespeare was attributed to Bacon, Lord Oxford and host of others, even to Christopher Marlowe.
The revival of English theatre at the end of the Victorian era saw him again placed on an eminence. These days his plays are in constant production all over the world, global audiences finding in them aspects of comment on their own cultural situations, whether in Moscow or Central Africa. But we retain odd ideas. Julius Caesar in modern dress has to use, say, Nazi uniforms – never those of the USA.
The poems and the plays speak to humanity, but Shakespeare the man remains mysterious. The poet is almost invisible in what records survive behind the astute and often conniving business man with his connections to the London criminal underworld.
Poems
Yet the poems and the plays reveal a mind and imagination that still affects us. Shakespeare, born in 1564, was a child of the Elizabethan era. In this time Puritans and Catholics were still persecuted as a matter of government policy to maintain a broad Protestant nation. But whatever he was, Shakespeare was not a Protestant. He has been described as a sceptic with Catholic sympathies. There has been much discussion about his Catholicism. Certainly, as Eamonn Duffy has shown, in rural England Catholic sentiments remained even as the Prayer Book was imposed.
One does not imagine that Shakespeare was pious, though the family he grew up may have been, for his father was certainly a Recusant. But his mind and his work reveal an imagination suffused with the philosophy of both the Middle Ages and the emerging modern scientific outlook. Perhaps because he was receptive to a wider range of ideas, his work appeals today to a wide range of audiences. He was perhaps the first writer for a globalised culture.
Over the centuries other writers have attempted to portray Shakespeare in plays, films and novels. These nearly all disappoint. Like Shakespeare in Love, they show only the playwright in his London life, not the young Shakespeare, not the middle aged of Stratford.
One that does still appeal to me – and which can still be read with pleasure – is Anthony Burgess’ 1964 novel Nothing Like the Sun (Allison and Busby, £8.99). But this should be linked with Burgess’ Mr Enderby trilogy (Vintage Classics, £10.99), which provide a readable view inside and out of a sceptical, worldly Catholic poet, much like Burgess – or indeed William Shakespeare. Here, for once, literature emerges from literature.